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Blazing fast Firefox 4 beta 7 impresses

Mozilla has announced the availability of Firefox 4 beta 7. This pre-release …

Mozilla has announced the availability of Firefox 4 beta 7, a prerelease build for users who want to help test the next major version of the popular open source Web browser. It includes JaegerMonkey, Mozilla's enhanced JavaScript engine.

During our tests of the new beta, we were consistently impressed by its outstanding performance and greatly improved responsiveness. It delivers highly competitive performance and puts Firefox back on an even footing with its rivals. The beta also brings the Firefox 4 theming overhaul to Linux, including the new tab position above the address bar.

Windows and Mac OS X users will find that WebGL is enabled by default with supported hardware. Intel graphics hardware isn't supported yet, but will be in the future. Linux users can expect to see WebGL enabled by default in a future beta release. Hardware-accelerated rendering, which is used for certain graphical operations, is working with Direct3D on Windows and OpenGL on Mac OS X.

On the standards front, Mozilla has introduced support for HTML5 forms, which enables sophisticated browser-side form validation. Text input elements now support a "pattern" attribute that Web developers can use to specify a validation regex for the field.

We benchmarked beta 7 on an Ubuntu desktop computer with a six-core Intel i7 980X processor. It blazed through the SunSpider test in a mere 208ms. On the same computer, Chromium 6 took 224ms. Mozilla's efforts to improve JavaScript performance are clearly paying off. The beta also opens and closes nearly as fast as Chrome and offers smoother scrolling and tab switching than the previous version.

Users who want to try out the beta themselves can download it from Mozilla's website. For additional details, you can refer to the official release notes. The final release is expected to arrive next year.

97 Reader Comments

On my Win7 x86_64, the score in Peacekeeper went from 4610 to a whooping 4690-ish. Also no tangible difference on Kubuntu 10.10 x86_32. Maybe Peacekeeper is not the right benchmark? Or maybe I need a fresh install.

The difference in loading speed is significant to me, I was really on the verge of giving up on the beta and going back to Chrome before this build. Now I'll give it a week to see if the issues are done with, but so far, this is way better that 4.0b6.

I hate that artificial benchmarks that test extremely limited scope areas of browser performance have become the new standard for evaluating browsers, alongside bogus compat tests like ACID3. I'll be glad when someone releases a real end-to-end webapp that can measure browser performance doing real work. W3C is taking care of ACID3 by publishing real testing guidelines now at least. Good ridance to ACID3.

After running beta7 for a day, I have to say that the difference really *is* noticeable. It does feel far snappier than b6 did.

Of course, they're seemingly still only optimizing on very simple sequential workflows (browser startup, page render, browser shutdown). I'm still waiting for the day when they tackle refresh with multiple tabs open, as mentioned above, or just put the address bar suggestion lookup in a different thread so it can't block the entire browser. It's still essentially a singlethreaded application, which just gets painful whenever *any* task takes more than a few milliseconds.

Wouldn't adding some SSE-magic gain more speed-improvements than needlessly rewriting engines, which in turn still have to work on ancient hardware? Or just offer compilations with enabled CPU-specific optimizations?

And yes, I know about the "Pale Moon Project", but I have no interest in dealing with possible useragent-problems, profile-path-hiccups etc.

What I need is a way of limiting refresh to when a tab is being viewed when my wife has a gazillion tabs open so it doesn't slow the entire system down.

Or just use Opera. It can actually cope with tons of tabs (I'm usually in the 50-75 range but I've been as high as 150 with no problems what so ever). Of course it uses some memory but that is cheap and easy to get so much that no amount of tabs is going to fill it.

I am using the Mindfield Beta 8 Nightly build and its faster then Chrome 7 release. Chromium 9 is a nightmare right now and I finally just uninstalled it. I am really impressed with the FF developers. Its been a really long grueling year but every thing they said would happen is actually coming true. The problem with Chrome for power users/secure users is that they don't address the security factor upfront. Do a search for "security" on Chromes extensions and you will find about 10 plugins not even for security. The "not script" and "adblock chrome" extensions are hack jobs that don't work like the FF versions and really slow chrome down. Chrome or Webkit decided that giving developers the ability to create plugins like "noscript" was not important and now FF is just as fast and has the ability. If these Webkit browsers don't fix this problem its going to be hard to compete with FF.

Don't read mozilla release notes - they may in fact optimize for SSE. The beta 4 release notes link to FF3's support page, which states os x 10 4 is supported, when it is in fact not for firefox 4. The release notes only indicate that PPC is no longer supported.

I haven't decided whether to chuck my rev a mac book pro still running 10.4 - I am on the second crappy power brick (it, like the original, is fraying apart despite it never leaving the house), I need a battery replacement, so I don't feel inclined to put money into it to upgrade the os

I hate that artificial benchmarks that test extremely limited scope areas of browser performance have become the new standard for evaluating browsers, alongside bogus compat tests like ACID3. I'll be glad when someone releases a real end-to-end webapp that can measure browser performance doing real work. W3C is taking care of ACID3 by publishing real testing guidelines now at least. Good ridance to ACID3.

Moz agrees with you, they just couldn't say anything about it until they were competitive in the popular benchmarks without it being dismissed as sour grapes. Now that they *are* competitive, expect to see them start pushing real-life workload based benchmarks like Kraken.

Does anyone have any observations about the Firefox beta's security situation? I was getting more malware and crap detections when I was running Firefox than I was with Internet Explorer. I've been using Chrome for about 6 months and haven't had a single issue.

On my Win7 x86_64, the score in Peacekeeper went from 4610 to a whooping 4690-ish. Also no tangible difference on Kubuntu 10.10 x86_32. Maybe Peacekeeper is not the right benchmark? Or maybe I need a fresh install.

IIRC, there are some performance-related settings on beta 6 that are disabled by default, because the related code paths are not stable enough. Apparently in beta 7 those code paths are stable enough so the settings are enabled by default.

Problem is, if you install beta 7 on top of an existing beta 6, it will use the settings of beta 6.

Thus, if you really want to taste beta 7's performance improvement, not only must you first uninstall beta 6, but you must also zap its profiles, settings, whathaveyous, so that the beta 7 will install with the proper settings.

I hate that artificial benchmarks that test extremely limited scope areas of browser performance have become the new standard for evaluating browsers, alongside bogus compat tests like ACID3. I'll be glad when someone releases a real end-to-end webapp that can measure browser performance doing real work. W3C is taking care of ACID3 by publishing real testing guidelines now at least. Good ridance to ACID3.

Moz agrees with you, they just couldn't say anything about it until they were competitive in the popular benchmarks without it being dismissed as sour grapes. Now that they *are* competitive, expect to see them start pushing real-life workload based benchmarks like Kraken.

First of all I have to say that for real life browsing I think most browsers today are quite similar. It all comes down to whether you know you can use an alternative browser to IE, and how much you like the UI of each browser.

That said, when we come down to comparing sizes, so to speak, I really think we should be doing some real life tests. Who cares about a couple of ms in a synthetic benchmark? MS has some nice benchmarks on its "Experience the Web" site, or whatever it's called. Of course, I wouldn't trust it not to be biased towards IE9... Is there any comparable site that's browser-agnostic?

Does anyone have any observations about the Firefox beta's security situation? I was getting more malware and crap detections when I was running Firefox than I was with Internet Explorer. I've been using Chrome for about 6 months and haven't had a single issue.

Dunno, I've been running Firefox for years, and haven't had any issues with malware whatsoever.

That said, when we come down to comparing sizes, so to speak, I really think we should be doing some real life tests. Who cares about a couple of ms in a synthetic benchmark? MS has some nice benchmarks on its "Experience the Web" site, or whatever it's called. Of course, I wouldn't trust it not to be biased towards IE9... Is there any comparable site that's browser-agnostic?

That was essentially my point. There needs to be more tests like the IE9 site, but one developed by a web firm or group that also doesn't have a stake in the "browser war". From what I have seen, the IE9 tests are actually quite HTML5-specific and browser agnostic, particularly in testing DOM, but they will never be trusted by the "tech public" at large simply because they came from MS. Someone that is not MS, Google, Apple, Opera, or Firefox needs to create something similar on their own.

Wouldn't adding some SSE-magic gain more speed-improvements than needlessly rewriting engines, which in turn still have to work on ancient hardware?

JaegerMonkey assumes SSE2 is available and is turned off at runtime on processors where SSE2 is not supported. There are SSE2 codepaths (again, runtime detected) in the audio/video code, various image code, etc. The Tracemonkey JIT will use SSE2 if available.

Hurda wrote:

Or just offer compilations with enabled CPU-specific optimizations?

There's still an open question as to whether to support Firefox 4 at all on CPUs with no SSE2. Unfortunately, a number of systems that were commonly as recently as 3 years back had no SSE2 support (the Athlon line).

I just wiped my firefox install and installed beta7. I haven't spent more than 10 minutes in firefox in the last two years or so and I have to say that compared to that this beta is absolutely incredible. That being said, it still doesn't feel quite as quick as chrome.

On Mac, Firefox Beta 7 now comes as 64-bit by default. It runs 32-bit plugins, like Flash, without a hitch. (Well, Flash still crashes, but Flash always crashes.)

However, I'm noticing it uses about 50% more RAM than Beta 6. Whereas Beta 6 used to average between 600 and 800 MB for me, Beta 7 averages between 900 and 1200 MB under the exact same usage conditions. How that happened, I have no clue. It's a stunning increase in resource hogging, even for Firefox.

Why did you compare Firefox 4 with Chromium 6?That's like comparing Chromium 9 with Firefox 3.5.

Chrome 7 = stableChrome 8 = betaChrome 9 = dev

They should have compared to Chrome 8. Chrome 9 is more like alpha and is not in the same league as FF4b7 stability wise.

Firefox releases are few and far between, where Google releases several "versions" (with only minor changes) per year. With FF4 being in its 7th beta, it is getting close to the next major version, which represents a massive back-end engine change. Beta7 is also completely useable, but Chrome 9 is not.

Even so, I believe all of these versions of Chrome use v8 javascript engine. So the speed difference shouldn't be too big.

First of all I have to say that for real life browsing I think most browsers today are quite similar. It all comes down to whether you know you can use an alternative browser to IE, and how much you like the UI of each browser.

In terms of Javascript the answer is "not really". Granted I have an edge case, but my Netflix Instant Watching queue has over 300 movies -- I treat it more like a bookmark than an actual watch queue. Prior to Beta 7 the only browser that could handle the screen with any degree of responsiveness was Chrome. Beta 7 is now just as fast, if not slightly snappier (closer to "teh"), as Chrome.